Welcome to issue 25 of JavaScript Weekly. This week was intense! I don't know if it was due to the buzz around JSConf 2011 in Portland, Oregon, but lots of stuff has been going on in the JavaScript world. So much so that I've had to put my curator's cap on super-tight for this issue..

Headlines

jQuery 1.6 Released—
jQuery 1.6 is now available for mass consumption. It includes a major rewrite of the Attribute module and a number of performance improvements.

npm 1.0 Released—
The Node Package Manager, a popular JS library and program installation tool, has hit version 1.0. A big new feature is support for both global and local installation of packages. A 6 month 'code freeze' for major new features or architectural changes has also been enacted so you can feel confident about upgrading.

Understanding Monads With JavaScript—
If you've taken even a mere glance at functional programming, you'll have heard of monads. They provide such a brain bending experience that it seems there can never be enough explanations of what they are and how they work so this JavaScript version is much welcomed ;-)

Brendan Eich's JSConf.US Presentation—
Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript, went on stage with Jeremy Ashkenas (of CoffeeScript fame) at this week's JSConf conference and shared some thoughts and updates on the future of JavaScript/ECMAScript. He shares the slides here.

A JavaScript Performance Issue with Chrome and Safari—
Erik Moller of Opera discovered that Chrome was clocking in at 60 times slower than Opera for unzipping data using JavaScript. He's distilled the experiment into a tiny test case and while Firefox, Opera and IE are all fast, Chrome and Safari are miles behind.

Traceur: Google's Vehicle for Javascript Language Design Experimentation—
Traceur is a JavaScript.next-to-JavaScript-of-today compiler that allows you to use features from the future today. Traceur's goal is to inform the design of new JavaScript features which are only valuable if they allow you to write better code. Traceur allows you to try out new and proposed language features today, helping you say what you mean in your code while informing the standards process.

Humane JS: Simple Notifications in the Browser—
Humane JS is a simple, framework-independent, well-tested, unobtrusive, notification system that degrades gracefully. It uses CSS Transitions where available otherwise falls back to JS animation.

Queue.js: Simple and Efficient Queues in JavaScript—
Queue.js is a simple and efficient queue implementation for JavaScript whose dequeue function runs in amortised constant time. As a result, for larger queues it can be significantly faster than using arrays.

Hacker Monthly Issue #11—
Hacker Monthly is a great magazine based on popular Hacker News submissions. Its editor, Lim Cheng Soon, has helped me out in the past so I want to repay the favor by linking up a recent issue whose cover features a crazy bit of JavaScript code. We hope to give away some free subscriptions to JavaScript Weekly readers in a future issue..